Free The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

ears; that would have to be against some law.
    Sandi usually worked the morning shift alone, and we got to know each other. My room in the Republic had a hot plate for warming cans of soup, but sometimes I ate out just for the company. The Burger Derby was safe. No one there was likely to ask you where you were holding your tension.
    Sandi turned out to be horse-crazy. When she found out I was from Kentucky she treated me like I had personally won the Derby. “You are so lucky,” she said. “My absolute dream is to have a horse of my own, and braid flowers in its mane and prance around in a ring and win ribbons and stuff.” She had this idea that everyone in Kentucky owned at least one Thoroughbred, and it took me some time to convince her that I had never even been close enough to a horse to get kicked.
    “In the part of Kentucky I come from people don’t own Thoroughbreds,” I told her. “They just wish they could live like one.” The Thoroughbreds had their own swimming pools. My whole county didn’t even have a swimming pool. I told her what a hoot we all thought it was when these rich guys paid six millionfor Secretariat after his running days were over, since he was supposedly the most valuable stud on the face of the earth, and then he turned out to be a reticent breeder, which is a fancy way of saying homosexual. He wouldn’t go near a filly for all the sugar in Hawaii.
    Sandi acted kind of shocked to hear this news about Secretariat’s sex life.
    “Didn’t you know that? I’m sure that made the national news.”
    “No!” she said, scouring the steam table like a fiend. She kept looking around to see if anyone else was in the restaurant, but no one was, I’m sure. I always went there around ten-thirty, which is a weird time of day to eat a hot dog, but I was trying to get Turtle and me onto two meals a day.
    “What’s it like to work here?” I asked her. There had been a HELP WANTED sign in the window for going on two weeks.
    “Oh, it’s fantastic,” she said.
    I’ll bet, I thought. Serving up Triple Crown Chili Dogs and You Bet Your Burgers and chasing off drunks and broke people who went around the tables eating nondairy creamer straight out of the packets would be fantastic. She looked about fourteen.
    “You should apply for it, really. They couldn’t turn you down, being from Kentucky.”
    “Sure,” I said. What did she think, that I was genetically programmed to fry chicken? “What’s it pay?”
    “Three twenty-five an hour. Plus your meals.”
    “What am I even talking about? I’ve got this kid,” Isaid. “I’d have to pay somebody more than that to take care of her.”
    “Oh no! You could just do what I do, take her to Kid Central Station.”
    “You’ve got a kid?”
    “Yeah, a little boy. Twenty-one months.”
    I had thought Pittman was the only place on earth where people started having babies before they learned their multiplication tables. I asked her what Kid Central Station was.
    “It’s free. See, it’s this place in the mall where they’ll look after your kids while you shop, but how do they know? See what I mean? The only thing is you have to go and check in every two hours, to prove you’re still shopping, so I just dash over there on my breaks. The number five bus just goes right straight there. Or I’ll get some friend to go. The people that work there don’t know the difference. I mean, they’ve got these jillion kids crawling all over the place, how are they going to know if somebody’s really one of ‘em’s mother?”
    Sandi was sliding the little white buckets of cauliflower and shredded carrots and garbanzo beans into the holes in the salad bar, getting ready for the lunch crowd. For some odd reason they had artificial grapes strewed out over the ice all around the buckets.
    “I’ll go check it out,” I said, although I already had a good notion of what it would be like.
    “If you’re going right now, could you check in for my little boy?